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(123 acre feet); Silver Lake (2,162 acre feet), Bellevue (107 acre feet); Elysian (166 acre feet);
Buena Vista (40 acre feet); Solano (17.5 acre feet); Hazard (8 acre feet), Mt. Washington (0.9 acre
feet); Highland (61 acre feet); Garvanza (2.3 acre feet); San Pedro (26 acre feet) and Wicks
[Rowenna] with 93 acre feet; for a total storage capacity of 24,796 acre feet, only 27% of the City's
then-available storage.
With their dream of building Long Valley indefinitely on-hold, BWWS water bureau
worked feverishly through the early 1920s to design and construct additional storage facilities, all
within close proximity of Los Angeles and south of the San Andreas fault. What resulted was a
second generation of reservoir construction, aimed at completing 67,000 acre feet of additional
storage, increasing local storage capacity by almost three-fold.

TABLE 1
DAMS BUILT BY L. A. BUREAU OF WATERWORKS & SUPPLY (1921-26)

Reservoir Name Height Dam Type Reservoir Ca- Years of Con-
pacity acre-feet struction
Lower Franklin 96 feet hydraulic fill & 1,050 1921-22
rolled earth
Stone Canyon 147 feet rolled earth 8,000 1921-24
Upper San 82 feet hydraulic fill 1,850 1921-22
Fernando
Lower San raised 7 feet rolled fill additional 1924-25
Fernando 3,800, to 14,670
Encino 135 feet hydraulic fill 3,229 1921-24
Sawtelle 34 feet rolled earth 103 1923-24
Ascot 73 feet rolled earth 219 1925-26
Hollywood 200 feet concrete gravity 7,500 1923-25
St. Francis 195 feet concrete gravity 32,000 1924-26
Total added 57,751 by mid 1926
capacity

Construction began on Stone Canyon Dam in the Santa Monica Mountains above what is
now Bel Aire Estates in 1921. A tabulation of the major reservoir projects in the early 1920s is
provided in Table 1. Though significant in scale, the reservoir construction program would come
too late to save the San Fernando Valley crops during the 1923-24 season, when the drought
returned after a brief respite, the year previous. This ambitious program of capital works
improvements received an infusion of funding between 1921-26. To accomplish this goal, five new
reservoirs were built and two existing structures enlarged. Of the 57,751 ac-ft of additional storage,
41,576 ac-ft of storage was lost with the failure of the St. Francis Dam in 1928 and the lowering of
Hollywood Reservoir behind Mulholland Dam in 1931. Much of these losses were offset by the
completion of Bouquet Canyon Reservoir in 1934, with a capacity of 36,505 ac-ft.

World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2017